Meet the Baptist baseball lifer who will coach Israel’s national team

Visiting Israel the past few winters to see his daughter and her family led to an unexpected job for Jerry Narron, a devout Christian and a baseball lifer: a coaching position for Israel’s team in the next World Baseball Classic.

In 2013, Callie Mitchell had just enrolled her son Aviel, now 5, in the Israel Association of Baseball’s T- ball league and mentioned to the IAB ’s president, Peter Kurz, that her dad is Narron, the bench coach for the Milwaukee Brewers and twice a big league manager.

On Narron’s visit that winter, he met with Kurz in Tel Aviv and offered to help promote baseball in Israel. after Narron addressed some youth players on the field in Petah Tikvah last December, a light bulb went off for Kurz: add Narron to the WBC staff.